Part IV: A life laid out in court documents

The fourth installment in the five-part series My Father, His Firebombs and Me, in which Post reporter Peter Kuitenbrouwer, in Ukiah, California, describes growing up with a hippie father who was on the run.

Stepping between towering, twin magnolia trees that flank its entrance, I walk up 25 steps to the front door of the Mendocino County Courthouse in Ukiah, Calif. Inside, a crest set in the terrazzo floor, now obstructed by the metal detector, depicts a grove of redwoods. It is a common motif, here in the north coast of California they call the Redwood Empire; still, it is a symbol I find ironic because it was when my father, in an ill-fated plot, sought to protect the redwoods, that they locked him up.

I walk down the hall, earlier this year, past the sheriff’s deputies in conversation to the records department. I had mailed a money order in advance, to ensure they pulled my father’s files from the basement. James, in the criminal division, hands me Roll 84 and lifts the plastic wrap off the microfilm machine, which sits in a hall. “It’s a dinosaur, but it works,” he says.

The spools whir, and then the case unrolls in front of me. The People of the State of California, plaintiff, vs. Paulus Kuitenbrouwer, aka Paul F. Brauwer, aka Paul Frank Brouwer, defendant.

There are 177 pages: the preliminary examination, the probation officer’s report, the “order of commitment of insane person,” the order that “said defendant is now sane,” and the 92-page sentencing hearing, which includes testimony from my mother’s sister, her husband, and two of my father’s brothers. My father’s hijinx put an impressive dent in the coffers of the State of California.

It takes me all day to copy the typewritten accounts. I can’t help sneaking glances at the details — he served three months in jail in B.C. after a hit and run; he wound up in solitary confinement after his girlfriend tried to smuggle him a file to a California prison, hidden in a chocolate bar; one of the Molotov cocktails was in a quart bottle of Schlitz beer.

When the court closes for the night, I repair to the Ukiah Brewing Company next to the courthouse, which is holding an open mic night. The waiter brings me a votive candle and, as long-haired dudes strum their guitars, I pick at a pomegranate and feta salad and read by flickering light the details of Case 4777-C.

Encapsulated in these pages is the whole arc of my father’s life to age 35, which bears similarities to those of others of his generation: from his childhood in occupied Holland, through immigration to Canada, aged 19, his early success founding a steel company in Vancouver, then overwork, leading to the collapse of his marriage to my mom and his embrace of the hippie culture, emboldened by the people he meets in Mendocino.

“My life took a new turn,” my father, who wore handcuffs, told his lawyer, Merle Orchard, during his sentencing hearing on Dec. 23, 1969. “I felt I should probably spend more of my life in, in helping people, looking for a new direction in which people should live.” These sentiments may sound lofty to some but to me they drive home how he entirely stopped thinking of his own three children; he even misstates the year of my birth. (As I type these words, back in Toronto, I am preparing to stop in at my son’s Grade 3 class at lunchtime, to present a soufflé that he and I baked together, to celebrate his 9th birthday; I can’t help but reflect on my own childhood, and a father who was not there for me.)

What emerges from my father’s court documents, more than any grand tale of 1960s heroism, is a portrait of a man who, scarred by the squalour of his youth during World War II, then fuelled by plentiful drugs and easy sex, makes a series of bad judgment calls, flees at every sign of trouble, and ends up a remorseful shadow of the hero he had styled himself.

On April 23, 1969, the state charged my father with two counts: that he did “possess a flammable, combustible material or substance .. with intent to wilfully and maliciously use such material,” and that he “did possess or manufacture a fire bomb.”

My father jumped bail; police arrested again him four months later. The court finally was able to hold his preliminary examination Aug. 25, 1969, at this court. Fort Bragg rookie police officer Victor Shuman describes arresting my father on April 22, 1969, at 10:37 p.m., after pulling over a Renault driven by his co-accused, Stephen Anapolsky, for a “headlight being out.” He says that “before I got out of the vehicle, the patrol unit, I observed the passenger, Mr. Brower, fumbling around in the front, by the floor boards in the front seat.” Then, “I observed a quart bottle … sitting on the passenger side below Mr. Brower’s feet. I also observed a rag hanging out of this bottle. I asked Mr. Brower to remove the hat that was covering the remaining five bottles.”

On Sept. 12, 1969, my father pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; a judge sent him to Atascadero State Hospital, a “to remain in said hospital until he becomes sane.”

On Oct. 22, 1969, a case summary from Atascadero recommended he be returned to court to stand trial. It notes, “Patient was transferred to Ward 14 due to his having had a friend send a package to the hospital which had three (3) hacksaw blades enclosed in a melted-down chocolate bar and resealed.” Elsewhere the report adds, “He was involved in a plot with another patient to escape.” In “significant social history,” the report adds, “patient has a wife in Canada and three minor children who he claims to have not seen in the past three years [we had been with him at his arrest a month before] though he proclaims that he remains in love with her.” The report mentions visits to the jail by my father’s girlfriend, and adds, “He has used LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs and for the past several years has seen himself as a martyr for the ‘hippie’ cult and has devoted his time and energy to their cause.”

(My father told me he had gone on a hunger strike, in order to be sent to the mental hospital, which he thought would be easier to escape from; when that didn’t work, he decided to plead).

On Dec. 3, 2009, my father pleaded guilty to a violation of Sec. 452, Sub. (b) of the Penal Code, “to wit, possession of a fire bomb.” Three weeks later, on Dec. 23, the court held a sentencing hearing before Judge Wayne P. Burke. The court put on a show, bringing armed guards into the courtroom, enraging my father’s lawyer, Merle Orchard, who commented, “Right now officialdom through the sheriff’s office has seen fit to send four deputies, armed deputies down to this court to be sure that this man doesn’t do anything. The very presence of these men, in this manner, for this one single little human being … can’t help but prejudice the court, this show of strength.”

The court, though, was in no mood for generosity. A probation officer’s report entered as evidence notes, “There is little doubt in the mind of this writer that Mr. Kuitenbrouwer is a highly intelligent individual and also has had an extremely tragic number of experiences in his life,” the officer writes, “but at the same time [that] cannot excuse his actions. Paul lived in Holland during World War II and remembers very well the difficulties with the German Occupation. … He learned that anything wearing a uniform needed to be counteracted. He remembers vividly his father being taken from the home and beaten. Food was so scarce that he and his brother one time attempted to steal some bread from the German Occupation Force. For this, the defendant received a bullet in his leg at the age of approximately ten.

“When the defendant entered Canada, he of course went to work and in 1961 became part owner of a steel fabricating firm. He … states that his marriage went down due to the fact of too much time involved in his work and not enough with his wife and children.”

Still, the probation officer recommends that, “considering the seriousness of the crime, the total disrespect of the law as indicated by his past record, and his escape attempt while at Atascadero State Hospital … probation be denied.”

Mr. Orchard still hoped to get my father deported to Canada, rather than sent to a California jail. Among witnesses, he called my father, my uncle Keith Brueckner, a nuclear physicist, and his wife, Elsa Brueckner, my mother’s sister; plus my father’s younger brothers Joost and Roland Kuitenbrouwer.

My father told the court, “I made this mistake. I, for a moment, contemplated this sort of action. I — I — I don’t know how to say it. Of course, I wish now that it had never happened. I know, even if circumstances were the same, that it wouldn’t happen again. Also, I know deep down that I wouldn’t have done it.”

Dr. Brueckner called my father, “an intense and charming individual … a gentle man and a very, very kind person.” Joost Kuitenbrouwer testified that, “I like him very much, not only as a brother, but as a friend, and I think he is a very fine man.” Ms. Brueckner told the judge: “He tries more than most of us to live according to his ideals, and that’s why I admire him very much, because it’s – it’s easier to live ordinary lives, but he is trying the hard way to live right.” A cross-examiner brought up her letter to the probation officer, in which she called my father’s views “unconventional,” and asked her, “did you mean by ‘unconventional’ different from normal mores, or against the mores of the community?”

“I would say that he would live closer to the mores than most people,” Ms. Brueckner replied.

The evidence is clear on one key point: the car containing the two men and the firebomb turned up Redwood Avenue on the fateful night, away from the target of my father’s wrath, before police stopped it; this suggests they changed their mind about throwing bombs. But by jumping bail and becoming a fugitive, and trying to escape, my father earned the court’s wrath. The judge quoted my father’s words, “in my delusion I took some bottles of gasoline and wanted to take them to Fort Bragg to set fire to a Union Lumber Company display cottage next to their parking lot there,” turned down probation and sent him to jail.

Paul Kuitenbrouwer spent 131 days in jail in 1969 and all of 1970 in jail.

Early in 1970 two women bore his children. Gloria Simpson, a young woman who quit the University of British Columbia to follow my father to California, had a boy; a young postal worker I call Sue, had a daughter.

“I took her down to visit him in Soledad a number of times,” Sue recalls. “[Our daughter] was a baby, five or six months old. But then I stopped going because he was too crazy.”

On Christmas Eve, 1970, he was ordered deported, and early in 1971 he traveled in handcuffs to Canada, into the hands of the RCMP.

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On the morning of Nov. 19, 2010, my father climbs the spiral staircase in his tiny house near Wendover, Ontario, and, from under his bed, extricates a cardboard box full of letters, photos and documents.

He had offered me a deal: I split four birch logs into firewood, for his cookstove; in exchange, he spends half an hour going through old documents. I step out in the crisp morning air and swing the hatchet; he emerges with a box.

“I’ve discovered that the mice have hidden a whole cache of dog food in this box,” he said, and pours a small mountain of kibble onto the earth.

He hands me a letter, dated January 16, 1971, from one of my father’s fellow inmates at Soledad Prison, written just after my father was deported to Canada. It ends: “So you’re gone, Kuitenbrouwer, to play with the purple spirits who hover like scorpio hawks among the orange dream-clouds of frail tomorrow, and who dive like doves to drink from the contagious white fountain of angel-like idealism; and though thoughts, austere and crimson, may always yet wound you; and though the backfiring of absolutism isolate you and hold you prisoner in the cells of self-echo; the sky is strong and it belongs to you, and you belong to it, pioneer Kuitenbrouwer.” Signed, Mordechai.